We thought it would be good to let you know what we have been up to in the last few months, besides publishing posts on our website. Well, we have been very busy improving our parser and the conjugators that are based on it. Some of the new features were added thanks to your input sentences, which made us aware of problems we had overlooked.

Most of the grammatical functions realized by phrases in the sentence fall into two classes: arguments and adjuncts. Distingusishing between these classes is one of our Parser's features. In this article we discuss some of the semantic characteristics of the two classes and mention a structural difference between them.

This article is concerned with a challenge posed to us by negative polarity items when we were developing the Contextors Voice Conjugator. We’ll begin by briefly introducing negative polarity items, and then proceed to discuss their interaction with voice alternation.

The Contextors' Parser assigns syntactic structure trees to strings of words in English. Developing the parser is a fresh trial of teaching a machine rules about different linguistic aspects of English. In the process of adding rules to the parser and examining its solutions, some interesting theoretical issues arise.

The Contextors Voice Conjugator is a tool for changing the voice of English sentences from active to passive and vice versa. It is based on Contextors’ syntactic parser, which assigns to sentences of English constituent structure trees where the nodes are annotated with syntactic category labels and grammatical function labels.

The Contextors’ syntactic parser assigns each input sentence a syntactic structure tree, a structure that represents the way in which the words of the sentence are put together. There three notions pertaining to trees, namely constituent structure, syntactic category and grammatical function, are all represented in the contextors trees.

In this article we discuss three of the structures that may be instantiated by preposition phrases headed by the preposition of. We focus on the meaning differences between the constructions, and mention why distinguishing between them may be of use in developing NLP applications.

The Contextors Tense Conjugator is a tool for changing the tense of English sentences. In what follows we discuss some of the linguistic assumptions we have made in constructing its first version, some of its shortcomings, and elements of its underlying technology.

Imagine you are an expert in the art of drawing circles. That is just your thing. You are aware of circles on so many different levels and have spent a long time learning and researching the topic. Imagine someone wants to hire you for your expertise (drawing circles!), wouldn’t that be great? Then you discover that you are only given paper, no pen/pencil/computer. That’s it. Make it work.

When using the Voice Conjugator to change the voice of a sentence from active to passive, you might find out that there is more than one passive counterpart to your active sentence. This can happen because of one or both of the following scenarios.

When using the Voice Conjugator to change the voice of a sentence from active to passive, you might find out that there are active sentences that don't have a passive counterpart. Intransitive verbs like ‘rest’, ‘dine’, ‘die’, ‘fall’, etc. cannot be passivized at all. Some verbs taking a direct object (sometimes with other complements following it) do not passivize their direct object.

Topics

Read First

The Contextors' Parser assigns syntactic structure trees to strings of words in English. Developing the parser is a fresh trial of teaching a machine rules about different linguistic aspects of English. In the process of adding rules to the parser and examining its solutions, some interesting theoretical issues arise.